Separate Beds (5 page)

The morning had been normal – the kind of morning when she operated on automatic. Before leaving for work, she had stripped the bed and stuffed the sheets into the laundry basket. She had made it with clean sheets, drawing the bottom one as tight as a drum, as she liked it. She had dressed in her customary uniform of skirt, blouse and jacket, selected a pair of shoes that gave a nod to frivolity without going over the top, and tutted over the state of her hair. All accomplished in the calm, reasonably well-organized manner that Annie had perfected.

But tonight the feminine order of her bedroom was totally at odds with the storm that had been unleashed. It also struck her as ridiculous that Tom was across the corridor, battling alone with his shock.

She knocked on his door and went in.

Tom sat on the bed with the empty brandy glass, apparently absorbed in the spectacle of his bare feet. He did not even turn his head at Annie’s entrance.

She sat down beside him. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?’

‘There’s nothing to say.’

Silence.

Talking was Tom’s thing. He had talked his way into university, into Annie’s heart and bed, and into the job he had just lost. Fluent, funny, opinionated, he was tolerated
even when he went too far and, in the old days, they had argued passionately, joyously, with gusto. Talking was his breathing, and silence was his dying.

The space between them on the bed seemed indicative. ‘We can make plans, Tom, budget … until you get a new job.’

‘Nice idea. Why didn’t I think of it?’

‘That won’t help.’ She was soft, conciliatory, let’s-take-this-gently.

‘Actually,’ he was at his most sarcastic, ‘the lawyer is concerned about what he terms the “architecture of my future”. Everyone’s concerned for the architecture of my future, including the organization that’s just dumped me. It’s terribly, terribly nice of them.’

‘Well, you do have a future.’

He turned his head and glared right through her. She prayed that he couldn’t see her panic. ‘Don’t you get it? I probably won’t find another job. A fifty-year-old radio executive ain’t exactly hot goods at the best of times.’

He sounded surprised at his own analysis – although they both knew he was probably right and Annie also knew she was expected to refute it. ‘And you’re going to give up, are you? Despite knowing that’s rubbish.’

‘Say that again in six months’ time. Have you been listening to what’s going on in the money markets?’

‘Stop it, Tom.’

‘Don’t pity me, Annie.’

She set her lips. ‘I’m not.’

Side by side they sat, not touching. Annie searched for an object on which to anchor and lighted on the long mirror hanging from a dodgy nail on the wall – Mia had insisted
on having it before she’d stopped caring about what she looked like.

Tom’s tightened fist rested on his thigh. If she reached over and picked up that clenched hand – a simple gesture – the odds were she could smooth out the fingers and stroke them into quietude. But she could no longer gauge whether he wished to be touched. For all Annie knew, he would push her away and that would wound her. Then again, she was out of the habit of touching him, of
wanting
to touch him.

‘Just get through the next few days …’ she pitched expectations low ‘… and then you can think.’

On the floor above, Emily banged an object down on the floor and her bed creaked.

‘Go to bed, Annie. I can’t think straight, nor can you. You can crow over me tomorrow.’

‘Tom!’

He jumped up. ‘Just go.’

Annie did her best. ‘Listen to me, Tom. I’m on your side.’

His expression was bleak, his hand cold as he pulled Annie to her feet and manhandled her towards the door. ‘Tomorrow.’ He pushed her out into the corridor.

My God, she thought, with a flicker of outrage. It’s come to this. She stared at Tom … and her outrage was deflated by a hard, painful pity for the hurt and humiliation he had inadvertently revealed by his actions. ‘Goodnight, Tom.’

Within seconds their doors had shut and the corridor between the two rooms was again dark.

Sadie and Annie met frequently. Sometimes, in order to escape the Westminster village, Sadie drove down to St Brigid’s and (Sadie very often in ridiculous high heels)
they walked in the park at lunchtime where they discussed everything under the sun.

A frequent topic was Sadie’s homesickness for her native Georgia – ‘I’ll get over it,’ she said bravely. ‘Or I’ll just go for a divorce hat-trick.’ Even though she was married to Andrew, the MP, Sadie’s straight talking remained unchecked. Her habit of voicing the things that, by and large, Annie only allowed herself to think was useful and wonderfully stimulating in a friend but possibly did not do Andrew’s career many favours.

Sadie could be funny. She could be rude. She could be alarming. But if the chips were down she was pure gold. When Annie phoned to tell her Mia had gone she came at once, winging like an angel into number twenty-two to make tea and dispense comfort while Annie sat broken at the kitchen table. She darted around the kitchen – it was a measure of her distress that she had abandoned the high heels for flats – then said, ‘Tell me everything.’

Annie stumbled over her narrative of events. Sadie clicked her teeth. ‘It’s bad,’ she said, and Annie loved her for being truthful. ‘I can’t do anything much for you.’

Annie raised her head. ‘Yes, you can. Come with me to try to find her. Tom can’t, or won’t, go.’

There was only a second of hesitation. ‘Of course.’

Together, they boarded a train north and made their way to halls of residence where they were refused admission. Retreating to the university registry, Sadie held Annie’s hand while an embarrassed member of staff informed Annie that her daughter had instructed them that no information whatsoever was to be given out and by law they must observe this edict.

There was no redress and nothing to be done. Sadie took Annie home, held her while she sobbed helplessly and coaxed her into bed. She knelt down beside it. ‘You must be strong, Annie. You mustn’t give in.’

How not to give in? In the days that followed Annie roamed the house like a wounded animal. Mia’s waterproof still hung on the peg. A pair of black jeans was in the laundry pile. Her old school bag lay abandoned in a cupboard.

The doorbell rang. One of Tom’s contacts had sent them a box of expensive chocolates as a thank-you for dinner. ‘Such a lovely evening …’ and so on and so forth. Nauseated, Annie glared at the luxurious confection of box and ribbon, clawed it open and tipped the contents into the bin. There, she thought.
There
.

She bore the violated box upstairs and placed in it (1) a pair of Mia’s laundered socks, (2) a torn maths exercise book, (3) a copy of
Where the Wild Things Are
in which, long before, Mia had written ‘Belongs to ME’. Later, when it came, she added the letter.

Sometimes Annie could trust herself only to take the box out of its hiding place and look at it. Sometimes she teased the lid open the merest fraction with a finger, terrified that Mia would escape entirely. These relics of a childhood breathed longing and sorrow, things broken and festering. They conjured, too, a time when Annie had been happy, and she caught her breath at the precariousness of it, and the waste that life could turn out to be.

Only half joking, she had once remarked to Sadie, ‘If only I had known about having children.’

‘You’re not serious?’

Annie tugged at a curl. ‘
No
.’

All the same, they agreed that Annie producing three children in three years was not the most cunning game-plan ever devised. ‘It kinda wrings a girl out. Neither body nor soul remains honeymoon fresh,’ Sadie remarked, in the Scarlett O’Hara drawl that had so fascinated the teenage Mia and Emily.

At the time they were having dinner in the House of Commons where she and Sadie sometimes holed up. The dining room was agreeably warm, full and noisy. A television screen in the corner revealed an almost full debating chamber with the Members stacked on the benches. Tom was working and Andrew, having crammed in a first course, had returned to the chamber for a big vote on the use of CCTV cameras.

Sadie was right. Three toddlers under five was plain bad strategy (and two of the many consequences were an enlarged waistline and fatigued skin tone). ‘Emily wasn’t planned,’ said Annie. ‘The twins were quite enough. But …’ Sadie raised her eyebrows and Annie said, ‘But Tom and I got carried away by – I quote from the catalogue – “the never-to-be-repeated bottle of Château Lynch-Bages, Pauillac, 1996”.’ She smiled at Sadie. ‘Our look-out, and I could never wish any of the children away.’

‘Even if they try to kill you with exhaustion and boredom?’

‘Especially if,’ said Annie. ‘But it’s lucky I’m not Napoleon.’ She was keeping half an eye on the celebrity count in the tea-room. ‘I would have lost the battles of Borodino and Austerlitz in one fell swoop.’

‘Come again?’ said Sadie, unversed in European history.

‘Deficient in forward planning. Look, isn’t that the Chancellor?’

The division bell rang for the vote and the television screen in the corner went temporarily blank.

Sadie said severely, ‘Pay attention to me, Annie, and don’t rubber-neck.’ She put down her cup, placed her elbows on the table and leaned forward. ‘So, what do we want?’

… ‘Crazy, crazy woman,’ said Tom, on their honeymoon. They had had hardly a penny between them, he loved fresh air and she loved walking. So, he had bought them both a pair of hiking boots and carried her away to the mountains above Salzburg. Of course, she couldn’t (and didn’t) resist twirling round and round in a green alpine meadow and singing, ‘The hills are alive …’

When she came to a stop, he was looking at her with his heart in his eyes. ‘You’re embarrassing. Do you know that?’

She had laughed. ‘Very embarrassing?’

‘Off the scale.’

Down the years she remembered the iced-water quality of the air rushing down into her heaving lungs, the sharp peaks and blue sky and that look in his eyes. Tom had taken hold of her. ‘I love you beyond speech,’ he had said, ‘but I have to tell you that you’re no good as Julie Andrews.’

There was then nothing more that Annie could have wished for.

Later on, as they had descended through the trees, and dusk was gathering, she heard the owl’s call. It had stopped her in her tracks: she was willing a repetition of the strangely beautiful, unsettling sound. She pictured the bird’s flurry of down and feathers, its iron hunter body and powerful, unblinking eyes.

Tom had stood beside her, his warmth and closeness as
vital to her as her own heartbeat. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ she had told him. ‘I’ll always listen out for the owl …’

Annie swallowed, but the lump in her throat refused to budge. She reached for the water glass. Grieving for remembered happiness did not do any good. Tom and she were different, oh, so different, now. Life lesson, Annie: however often its frames were played and replayed in her mind, the past was not retrievable. It was only a facsimile of a time when she had yearned and burned, and every cell in her crackled with life.

‘Yes, what is it we all want?’ asked Andrew, materializing above their table. ‘Good question.’ He sat down and slid his arm around his wife. ‘My favourite people,’ he said, and reached for his abandoned wine. ‘Vote over, thank God.’

Annie thought, Why isn’t Tom here?

I wish
.

She smiled at Sadie and Andrew. ‘You know what? I’d love to go dancing.’

Annie lay in her bed, listened to the wind blowing rain against the window and considered the options.

They could sell the house. To begin with, they hadn’t been keen on the south London area where streets of solid family homes had been constructed by speculative builders. But number twenty-two suited them. ‘Where else would we find a house that can fit in all of us?’ Annie had demanded of a reluctant Tom. ‘It’s cheapish, spacious, there’s a corner shop on the street, and who cares if it’s ugly Victorian, not desirable Georgian?’

True, like much of London’s housing stock, its anchor on London’s earth was precarious. Each season, new cracks
sprouted on the walls and in the brickwork. Whether they were the result of winter rain and the clay swelling, or summer drought and the clay shrinking, seemed irrelevant to Annie, who was (irrationally, perhaps) terrified the house would collapse. Tom, though, demanded to know which fissure belonged to which category – ‘Because, you stupid twit, if we know precisely what is wrong, we can do something about it.’

Most important was number twenty-two’s capacity to shelter the family with breathing space to spare. Over the years, there had been much switching of rooms. Three cramped bedrooms, plus a tiny bathroom, on the top storey had been designated for the children. But Mia had refused to sleep up there and now, with Jake married, only Emily occupied it. Not so long ago, the top of the house had echoed to the sound of Jake’s music, to the clump of his biker boots and the incessant buzz of Emily’s hairdryer. These days, it was mostly silent, save for the clack of Emily’s keyboard and her radio.

Clearing out Mia’s bedroom ready for Tom, Annie had unearthed evidence of her secret life in the pile of pamphlets stuffed under the bed.
The A–Z of Communism
,
Attacking the Status Quo from Within
,
Socialism in Today’s Capit alist World
– the last having been written by Mia’s boyfriend, Pete, in heavy-handed, apocalyptic prose. (She did not add any of these to the box.)

The wind was intensifying and blew a cataract of water against the pane. How particularly cruel it was, she reflected, to lose a job in the bleak no man’s land after Christmas when winter had dug in.

Could
they sell the house they had bought with such faith
and optimism? Their house. Her
home
. Annie put the option under the heading ‘Last Resort’. There were plenty of alternatives over which to fret, including the ‘if onlys’ and ‘things-that-should-have-been done’. Why had they left the roof retiling and the replacement of the sash window in Emily’s bedroom until now? If hers was the only income, there were bound to be difficulties with the (hefty) mortgage and she puzzled over how to tackle them. Could they use a percentage of their savings to top-slice it? Or some of Tom’s pay-off – surely he would get a pay-off?